Monday, August 7, 2017

What can we say come August 20? 11th after Pentecost

{to keep receiving links to these and other preaching materials and conversations, email me}I cannot imagine why a preacher would
forego the Old Testament lection for this Sunday – ever, but especially now,
given the severe splintering we’re experiencing in society, and in the
church.Genesis 45 is the theological high
water mark of the Old Testament, and is a peer of even the best the New
Testament has to offer.Reconciliation
should be the fixed point in all our thinking, imagination, labor, and
prayers.

I would commend to you the resources we
pulled together back in the winter as our church engaged in a two month long, intensive
series on Reconciliation, featuring Christena Cleveland and her
investigations into the hidden forces that keep us apart, why African-American
spirituals still speak across the racial divide today, how a novel like To Kill a Mockingbird can help us, ways
to understand people who are different, paths to interact on politics, and more
– as we fulfill Paul’s commission to us to be reconcilers, just as we are
reconciled (2 Corinthians 5), as individuals, within families, communities, our
denomination, and the nation and world.

I would also commend to you a stunning Ted
Radio Hour podcast featuring J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) and most profoundly, Suzanne Barakat, a Muslim
striving for reconciliation after her brother and sisters-in-law were brutally
killed in Chapel Hill.I was listening
in my car, and had to pull of the road until I stopped crying.This could work in a sermon on this text
well; further down I’ll get to the climax of Lord of the Rings and Good
Will Hunting – but the text really doesn’t need any help.

No biblical story narrates the grief,
time, joy and miracle of reconciliation as powerfully as the drama of Joseph.The emotional intensity of the climax in
chapter 45 is intense, and you have to let it be intense, and feel it in your
bones; let the story take your breath away or they won’t feel it either. The Egyptians overheard Joseph’s sobbing in
the next room; people in the pews had best hear it in the sanctuary.The weeping and embracing are just
astonishing, and so beautiful – and I can’t help at some point racing ahead to
the riveting moment when Joseph is reunited with his father; “he fell on his
neck, and wept on his neck a long time” (Gen. 46:29).

You can’t just plop down in chapter 45
either; the backstory matters.Without
over-explicating every detail, the preacher has to pick up where the story
begins, in chapter 37, with a pathetically dysfunctional family, Joseph’s dream
that was from God but felt like sham arrogance, the brothers’ cruel dispatching
of him and then the wretched way they shattered their father’s heart, Joseph’s
rise, and then fall, and then rise in Egypt.Don’t assume people know the story, but then don’t expend twelve minutes
retelling it either.Urge your people to
read it at home, promising it’s better than House
of Cards or Game of Thrones.

Here’s an interesting detail from the
Hebrew: of
all his sons, Jacob loved Joseph best – because his deepest affection was for
his mother Rachel, not the other mothers of his other boys.And so, Jacob dressed this son, not in an
“amazing technicolor dreamcoat” (as in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical - which is such silliness compared to his other work!), but
(as the Hebrew puts it) in “long sleeves.” The other brothers wore short
sleeves, meaning their labor was in the fields, in the heat, where briars would
get tangled in long sleeves. Joseph was established in the house with those
long sleeves, in a position of comfort and power over the brothers.It was that long-sleeved garment of privilege
denied them that they bloodied and handed to their father.

To focus on chapter 45 I wouldn’t spend
too much time on Joseph’s character – which isn’t really the point.He has considerable brilliance, and a moral
compass we do not see often in our days.But that would be to moralize a theologically robust story.The shock of God’s way comes when the famine
compelled the brothers to go down to Egypt, the breadbasket of the world. In a
stunning plot twist, it was Joseph from whom they had to ask for food. He would
give them far, far more. Naturally they didn’t recognize him; but he recognized
them. After dallying with them a bit, he dismissed his entourage from the room,
let loose long pent-up emotions, gathered himself, dried his tears, and
revealed his secret: “I am Joseph, your brother.”

When I preach on this, I let the emotion
drip, I leave time for it to flow around the room and into the souls of
people.His next words?“Is my father alive?”Again, in a pre-cell-phone era, he did not
know, and hoped against hope; the brothers, who had despised father and
brother, had to feel the gut-wrenchingness of his question.Mind you, the Bible doesn’t tell us how they
felt!So we have space to find our own
emotions from our own life stories in there somewhere – without reading in so
much you don’t hear Joseph’s story any longer.The brothers had to be stricken with shock, horror, guilt, trepidation,
remorse.

But how did Joseph deal with those who had
treated him and his father so cruelly? His words must have taken light years to
sink in: “Do not be distressed; don’t be angry with yourselves because you sold
me here. For God sent me here to preserve life” (Gen 45:5). Even after the
glorious reunion with his father, and then even after Jacob’s death, Joseph
said the most remarkable thing: “Do not be afraid. You meant evil against me;
but God meant it for good, so that many people should be kept alive” (Gen
50:20). Joseph forgave; he cast their common, broken life into the hands of
God’s larger intentions. Testimony to God’s miracle – in the big story, but
then also in Joseph’s gentle disposition.Who is capable of what he just said to them?

Notice the brothers weren’t given a “second chance,” another crack at
getting it right. They never got it right; they never made up for what they had
done. God did not depend on any attitude change among the brothers. God quite
simply used the evil they perpetrated and transformed it into good.

Not
that God caused them to do evil: God did not make them sell their brother or
break their father’s heart. But God gathered up their misdeeds, the broken will
of God, and pieced it all together for God’s good purpose. Joseph’s leadership
was defined by seeing, understanding, and then articulating this. He brought
healing to the fractured family, and food to a hungry world – or rather, his
leading was God’s imperceivable, mysterious use of his life, and then his awed
witness to it.It’s so important to get
this nuance: in my Will
of God book, I carefully distinguish that God uses evil but doesn’t
cause it; and we need to say God uses every evil for good.Some evils are just evil, and it eviscerates and
trivializes the suffering to try sunnily to claim God brings some good from it.

Leadership expert Ron Heifetz speaks of
the need for leaders who climb up into the “balcony” and see larger patterns in
the workplace. Joseph was caught up far
higher than the balcony; he was granted a view from heaven itself.Claus Westermann (in his Genesis
37-50 commentary) wisely noticed that God did not merely use the evil
of the brothers; God could have done that without the brothers ever meeting up
with Joseph. No, “God’s plan is to bring the evil devised by the brothers to
good in such a way that there can be forgiveness.”

So many threads to follow.Reconciliation takes time, a long time.Reconciliation isn’t forgive and forget; it’s genuine healing – for everybody involved.Joseph needed the healing as much as the
brothers and their father did.The
beneficiaries of this reconciliation?Not just this family, but people who had never known them!

If ever a text shouted to the preacher “Trust
me!” it is this one.You don’t need to
make it relevant; it’s more relevant than anything you can devise.You don’t have to make it interesting or
funny; it’s the greatest story ever told.

I might touch on “Joseph could control himself
no longer.”We are control freaks – but the
healing comes when we yield control and let the emotions roll.The emotion isn’t Oh, I feel God! but rather, Wow,
God is releasing, and healing my emotions! Think of the joy when the hobbits are reunited
in Rivendell after the ring is destroyed at Mordor (The Return of the King); J.R.R. Tolkien told a friend that when he
wrote this scene, his tears kept smearing the ink.He never saw the video of course, but
Peter Jackson handled this so well.

Or the scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean embraces Will and keeps repeating, “It’s not your fault, it’s
not your fault.”Very Genesis 45ish.Of course, the climactic scene of all
climactic scenes is the cross (“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for
good”) – or is it the resurrection? Or that breakfast reunion by Galilee (John
21)?************************************

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About Me

I’m pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC, and I also teach preaching and ministry at Duke Divinity School as an adjunct. I write regular inspirational/ educational pieces you’ll find here, reviews of books pertinent to faith today and ministry, and I love to be part of conversations about life with God and in the world among Christians and clergy.